Do Not Tell Me This Is Not Beautiful: On the Collaborative Art of Words and Images

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When Walker Evans accompanied James Agee on an assignment for Fortune in 1936, the two came to a certain realization that the bounds of magazine journalism would not permit a full portrayal of the Woods, the Gudgers, and the Ricketts — three families of poor white tenant farmers. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of that realization. Evans’s portraits of these families sit at the very front of the book, head-on shots of weathered faces, dark eyes, freckles, cheekbones. They are without text, without description. Agee’s prose flows out of and after these photos in deep contrast. It is luminous, cosmic, rhetorical, poetic. Tragic and lyrical, dense. It is direct. It speaks to the reader; it says care for these people, please.

No one bought this book. It floundered and flopped until resurrected in the years after Agee’s untimely death.

In 2007, the contemporary poet and photo historian John Wood published a book of photos and poems titled Endurance and Suffering: Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century. The photos are of the various patients of renowned 19th-century dermatologist George Henry Fox, photographed by O.G. Mason. They are horrifying. Psoriasis that plasters over the skin of a bearded man. An American man covered in 40 tumors, some kind of sarcoma that slowly whittled him to death. A young girl with scabies, her hands across her breast, praying in some kind of half-light.

Wood uncovered these photos and writes in a tender, probing, honest way about each of them. A poem accompanies each photo, and some deal explicitly with the visceral reaction of seeing the photo, simply — that moment before empathy comes, if it ever does. The poem that accompanies the photo of the American man with sarcoma begins, “What happened here?” It is told innocently, as if Wood wrote with a hand covering his eyes, some small slit through which he could barely see. The opening stanza of the poem about the young girl with scabies is defiant, reminiscent of Agee’s earnest and passionate defense of the divinity apparent in all humanity: “Forget medical history. / Imagine she was stung / While robbing a hive of honey. / Such beauty should be sung / Into pastoral poetry.” Similarly, the opening line of a poem about a 19-year-old girl with a severe case of elephantiasis, her legs swelled and pillowed and bloated, are simple, moving, haunting: “Do not say to me that she is not beautiful.”

However, like the then-experimental project of Evans and Agee, Wood’s book, published by Galerie Vevais, a German photography publisher, did not receive the critical recognition it deserved, especially in the United States, where Wood, the founder of the MFA program at McNeese State and the two-time winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, tried to publish it but failed. No American publisher wanted it, he says, in an interview with 21st Editions.

Why, though? In the same interview with 21st Editions, Wood asserts that the photographs of Fox’s patients repelled even him, the poet, stating, “I had long known those photographs that inspired the poems in Endurance and Suffering, but they repelled me, and I couldn’t understand why anyone but a historian of medicine would even look at them. But one of them, the naked girl with elephantiasis, stayed in my head like some cruel story, the sort you’ve heard, hate to recall, and would never tell someone you love.”

But it took time, and effort, and the slow dwelling on and carrying of things before that first line–– do not say to me that she is not beautiful — came to Wood in an honest way. Readers do not have to sit with that. No one is requiring us to. So we come to photos that repel us, and we turn the page, put our hands in front of our eyes, leave no slit through which we can allow some word or image of something-that-could-be-beautiful seep into our being. Evans’s photos occupy that same landscape. His tenant farmers do not shy away from the lens. They stare through the page, and their hurt immediately pushes the pressure points of human guilt and responsibility.

Now, though, the Midwest-based small publisher, Coffee House Press, is releasing a novel, House of Coates, by Brad Zellar, assisted by Alec Soth, who The Guardian in 2010 compared to both Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, placing Soth in a tradition of American open-road portraiture photography. What makes House of Coates interesting is its claim to fiction, and what that means and how that places it in the context of photography and prose collaborations. Centering on a few days in the life of a homeless drifter, Lester B. Morrison, the short novel is written with a certain authority, at times expounding the values of the drifting life, and the photographs are grainy film ones of simple things, simple homes, snow banks and sunsets, roadside diners, and clutters of abandoned trash. The photos serve as a sort of image map, and they are supposedly, for the sake of the work, taken by Morrison himself, grounding the reader in the true context of the story. There is the sense of stumbling upon a scrapbook, something collected and only important because we hold it in our hands.

What adds to the mystique of the novel is the constant, recurring notion that Lester Morrison actually exists — not merely in the fictional world, but in the actual one. House of Coates was first published by Soth’s photography-based publishing house, Little Brown Mushroom, which specializes in one-of-a-kind, limited-run art books. After its release, a Minnesota Public Radio article articulated the mystery of Lester Morrison. In the article, Soth states that he is not, as some readers attest, Lester Morrison, but the answer is still vague and generously unclear. Both Soth and Zellar claim to know Lester in a deeply nuanced way. They claim to know the results of a psychiatric test he took in 2009. And they claim, on the Little Brown Mushroom website, that the photos in House of Coatex were sent from Lester to them in a duct-taped shoebox. But Lester, by all accounts, is a now-gone mystery, and his presence, fictional or not, only exists in the pages of House of Coates, and in many ways, whether Lester exists is not the question at large. The true issue is why he matters. And, too, why all the Lesters of the world matter. Zellar knows this. In a 2012 Minnesota Post interview, he says, “Because the Lesters of the world tend to be largely inaccessible and tremendously unreliable characters, I had to make my own version of his story.”

Soth’s photos (it is my belief that they are Soth’s) contribute to that continual duality between the real and fictional Lester, for in this work he abandons his normal beauty-in-the-banal style of portraiture, eliminating the human face from the frame, putting a fictional eye behind the viewfinder. It serves to suspend belief at times. It is the literary shaky-cam, the found image. And though the story is haunting and lovely and artful, it is not repelling in the same way that Fox’s medical patients were. If we are put off by it, we can hide behind the fiction. If we are willing to hear the story of a man we might be willing to forget or never encounter in the first place, then we sit with the story, and the photos, and the romantic prose, and we allow it to encompass us in our own time, allow the real to merge with the surreal until we are unsure but still empathetic, held in the white space between fiction and nonfiction but at least at some semblance of ease with that suspended state.

The aim of House of Coates is similar to the aims of both Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Endurance and Suffering — to tell the story of the never-told, to delve into the underworld of society and come out with something human, tender, heartfelt. And, like these two other works, House of Coates is still considered an experimental work, despite the fact that we are a society of the image. The compiled image. The moving image. The flashing image, the pixelated one.

In a letter to the reader of the galley copy of House of Coates, Christopher Fischbach, the publisher of Coffee House Press, discusses how the original edition of the work, published by Little Brown Mushroom, was collected, not read. It was presented as a spiral-bound and limited-edition art book, and not circulated widely. It was a cherished thing. It was not passed along, given out, read, written over, read again. Fischbach says, in this letter, that House of Coates “deserves better.” Because of the story it aims to tell, and how it tells it, because of the hunting down of the never told and the taking stock of the never seen, it does. In the same way that Agee and Evans deserved better upon their initial publication. In the same way that John Wood deserved better upon his attempt at publication.

Despite this, House of Coates won’t garner a great deal of national attention, though it is a jewel of a book, a ghostly one. Zellar’s prose is authoritative and incantatory and gripping. But what is more telling is that this collaborative medium between prose and photography, poetry and photography, also deserves a more established home in the spectrum of the literary world, and I worry that it will not get there, because some might not find it necessary, because others might find it too much. But consider the reliance on the photographic image in Rachel Kushner’s dynamic and powerful novel The Flamethrowers, or the scene from Don DeLillo’sWhite Noise where Murray and Jack stand at the most photographed barn in America, and Murray states, “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one.” If that is the aim of the writer — to keep an image circulating in the consciousness of the reader, long after the sentence has ended — then it still must be the aim of the photographer, indeed, the aim of all artists at large. Murray’s questions at the end of that scene are the universal questions of artistry, of why photographers choose to photograph an object, a person, why writers chose to pick away at a story: “What was the barn like before it was photographed?…What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”

The writer and the photographer are not at any sort of odds. One form does not negate the other. They are both probing the world behind the limitations of their instruments, and, perhaps more importantly, behind the limitations of their individual ability for compassion, empathy, and tenderness. To place both forms of artistry within the same bound book allows for the engagement of multiple senses and for the opportunity of more catharsis, more movement, more truth. It sounds floozy, doesn’t it? But take out Evans’s photos from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and you have a young earnest man trying so hard to make us feel what he feels. We might dismiss Agee so quickly without Evans’s careful eye. But without Agee, Evans’s photos might only be human, and never divine.

House of Coates seems to be one small step in the direction that allows for a renewed attempt in combining the art of writing with the art of photography in a fulfilled literary sense. Not in the same sense as, for example, Jack Kerouac’s famed introduction to Robert Frank’sThe Americans, but rather as something more dynamic, reliant on the other. The photos in House of Coates reinforce the potential reality of the story, allowing us to probe if we want to, but giving us permission to suspend belief if we feel we must. In that sense, we, as readers, are secure. The hope, though, is that we sit just a little longer, each time, in whatever reality we find ourselves, and then a little longer still, until we are affirmed in some kind of beauty, whether it be in the turn of a line or the movement of syntax or the freckle on a high cheekbone or a grain of color layered upon film, or in those things combined, pointing them to a fellow reader, a friend, saying, asserting: do not tell me that this is not beautiful.

Devin Kelly
earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence (Anchor & Plume) and the books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (forthcoming 2017, ELJ Publications). He has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.

1.
The park ranger wore a pannier. The side-hooped undergarment held her dress out about a half foot at each side at the hip, creating even wider girth for the already stoutish civil servant. Over the frock, she wore an apron, and over her flushed cheeks and damp curls, a white ruffled mob cap.
It was not regulation National Park Service issue, the olive uniform topped with a Smokey the Bear hat. But nor was it a dress code violation, for the date was July 8th, which all will immediately recognize as the anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Every year, Independence National Park celebrates the occasion with a dramatic re-enactment of the first reading, performed by park rangers in period costume on a bunting draped stage behind Independence Hall. The program begins with scene-setting – on this day in 1776, the mood would have been tense and uncertain. The Declaration was an act of treason for its writers and backers, a gamble that would result in either in the glory of a new country or a death warrant.
“But we’re here to encourage you to have some fun,” said the ranger at the microphone, straightening his wool brass-buttoned waist coat. “Think of this as an interactive event. Join in with cheers and with huzzahs!”
“Or join in with boos,” he added, wiping sweat from his brow. Among the thousands of people who attended the first reading, many were loyal to the British crown. He inquired whether anyone in the crowd was of British descent, (“or even Canadian”). After a beat of dead silence, he dispatched a few costumed rangers into the crowd, to play the part of the dissenters.
Among them, the ranger in a pannier.
“Long live the King!” she shouted, over the cheers, whoops and dog whistles that came during the Declaration’s first reliable applause line, we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident-that-all-men-are-created-equal.
“You all shall hang!”
2.I should confess that I’m not a habitual attendee of historic re-enactment events. I’d only wedged myself into the crowd behind Independence Hall that day because Domestic Manners of the Americans had gotten into my head.
Domestic Manners was published in 1832, written by a British writer named Frances Trollope who had just spent four years traveling in the United States. She’d set sail enchanted with the egalitarian promise of the United States and left revolted not only by the poor state of American manners, morals, and lifestyle, but also by what she saw as American hypocrisy about equality. The book made its harsh assessments through a collection of finely observed and often hilarious sketches of everyday life, and a personal chronicle of “the general feeling of irksomeness, and fatigue of spirits, which hangs upon the memory while recalling the hours passed in American society.”
The book was an instant sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Over here, Domestic Manners sparked popular outrage, making Trollope among the first authors that Americans loved to hate. In reviews and in conversation, she was described as a harridan and a troll, and as a vulgar, improper, and silly lady.
In Britain, the book became a best seller, and it launched her writing career which would eventually include five other travel books and 34 novels.
Domestic Manners appeared poised to stand the test of time. The book was admired by her peers -- Charles Dickens consulted her work during his own travels in America. It was praised by writers that followed: Mark Twain took her book with him on his Mississippi journeys, and compared the clarity and accuracy of her writing to photography. In the mid-twentieth century, scholars credited Trollope with pioneering the now-familiar approach to travel literature, which relies on vivid scenes, lively dialogue, memorable characters and a strong authorial voice. “The most justifiably famous travel book of the century,” wrote scholar Helen Heineman, in her 1969 biography of Trollope.
And yet today, neither the author nor her debut book are well known or much discussed. Frances Trollope is best remembered for giving birth to her son, the novelist Anthony.
3.
I first read an excerpt of Domestic Manners in an out-of-print anthology of women’s travel writing. As soon as I finished, I downloaded the book. I was immediately captivated by her observations of early American behavior. There was the way men tended to sit with their legs propped up, “tossing their heels above their heads.” There were her thoughts on native eating habits: “They consume an enormous quantity of bacon.” And on table manners: “Their manner of devouring watermelon is extremely unpleasant; the huge fruit is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth, from either side of which pour copious streams of the fluid, while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.”
I had to side with her inability to excuse the regular expulsion of saliva, especially when mixed with tobacco: “I hardly know any annoyance so deeply repugnant to English feelings, as the incessant, remorseless spitting of Americans.” And while I don’t object to anyone using my first name, I knew exactly what she meant when she described this interaction: “I am sure she intended to be a very good neighbor, but her violent intimacy made me dread pass her door; my children, including my sons she always addressed by their Christian name, excepting when she substituted to the word ‘honey.’”
That was all good fun, but what kept me thinking about the book long after I’d finished it were her more serious observations, which centered on the wide gap between American rhetoric about equality and, well, reality.
For instance, she describes an incident that took place in the slave state of Virginia, where a young slave girl owned by a neighboring family had inadvertently ingested rat poison.
“As a matter of course I took the little sufferer into my lap,” Trollope writes. “I observed a general titter among the white members of the family, while the blacks stood aloof and looked stupefied. The youngest of the [white] family…after gazing at me for a few moments in utter astonishment, exclaimed ‘My! If Mrs. Trollope has not taken her into her lap and wiped her nasty mouth! Why I would not have touched her mouth for two hundred dollars!”’ When she inquired after the girl’s health later that day, the family “burst into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of really sympathizing with the sufferings of a slave appeared to them as absurd as weeping over a calf that had been slaughtered at the butcher.”
“You will see them with one hand hoisting up the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves,” Trollope wrote. “It is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and in their practice.”
Although the specifics have changed since Trollope’s day, the spirit she described is still plainly evident in current events. The 2012 presidential election, for instance, has included debates over equal access to marriage and economic opportunity, and ongoing arguments over equality for immigrants and for people of color.
Centuries of struggle, and such slow progress, to make equality a self-evident truth and not just a line we recite, in period costume, on muggy days in national parks in early July.
4.
Before I joined the audience for the anniversary reading of the Declaration of Independence, I stopped at “The President’s House,” a new permanent exhibit in Independence Park. It was built on the footprint of the house where George Washington lived during his presidency, along with the men and women that he’d owned as slaves.
Now, it’s not exactly a secret that Washington owned slaves. But we generally think of him as “a man who fought for liberty and who came to recognize the evils of bondage, freeing his slaves in his will,” which is the description Laura Bush went with in her remarks at the recent groundbreaking ceremony for the new African American museum in D.C.
This elision glides over Washington’s personal devotion to the institution of slavery. During his presidency, he moved his enslaved servants back to Virginia several times a year so they would not achieve the greater freedom afforded by Pennsylvania state laws. And he doggedly pursued slaves that attempted escape.
“The President’s House” shares this historical counter-narrative history through recorded monologues, performed by costumed actors playing the role of African Americans in Washington’s household. These continuously play on flat screen TVs, mounted on partial brick walls marking the house’s perimeter.
While I was waiting for the reading of the Declaration to begin, I realized that every single person in the audience had to walk past the new monument – it’s directly across Market Street from the Visitor’s Center and directly in the flight path to Independence Hall. Even if they hadn’t stopped there, the walkway was close enough to hear at least a few unsettling phrases from the soundtrack: “They wouldn’t admit we were fully human… labor extracted at a terrible cost… we, too are founding fathers of the United States.”
It is a definite disruption to the patriotic, rah-rah, we-the-people vibe in Independence Park.
I thought of Frances Trollope.
I thought she would approve.
As I waited for the reading to begin, my Trollope-influenced mind began to wonder whether anyone in the audience would display any discomfort, demonstrate any recognition of irony, or even subtly squirm when “all men were created equal” was proclaimed a self-evident truth.
I knew that was highly unlikely. I mean, a well-delivered line about universal equality at a historic national park? That’s like a lead singer asking the stadium “how ya doing?”
And indeed, the only person in the crowd to indicate anything other than full approval of equality was the woman playing the role of a British loyalist – the park ranger wearing the pannier.
5.
This leads me to this one final, and reluctant observation about Domestic Manners: there’s a good reason why it’s generally excluded from the modern canon of classic travel literature.
For after her scathing indictments the hypocrisy of American inequality, she reached a conclusion that seems strange to a modern reader: since equality isn’t working, let’s just scrap it.
She forcefully argued that the world would be far better off without equality and instead with a class-based system, ruled benevolently by the 1%. “How greatly the advantage is on the side of those are governed by the few,” she wrote, “instead of the many.”
This argument was one reason why the book was successful in England. At the moment of its publication, the country was debating legislation that would expand the right to vote beyond a tiny, wealthy, portion of the population. Trollope’s anti-equality message pleased powerful conservatives who were opposed to reform -- which gave the book a broader audience than a travelogue by a female writer would have otherwise found.
This marketing advantage would have been incredibly important to Trollope. For although she presents herself as an affluent traveler having a grand American adventure, she was actually in the United States to alleviate her family’s desperate financial straits. It was only after her various ventures failed that she noticed the success of Basil Hall’sTravels in North America, a book which also passed harsh judgment on the United States. She’d kept a journal up until that point with no specific purpose, but she realized her notes were a potential gold mine. Which, indeed, they turned out to be.
Still, a political argument that ensures success at the time of publication is often what consigns a book to historic obscurity. And an argument against the very idea of equality is so far outside the mainstream today that it’s only publicly expressed at historic re-enactments -- or by people who are fond of other costumes, such as those that are accessorized with white pointy hoods. This is unfortunate for many reasons, including for the way it obscures what’s enduring about Domestic Manners – the way Trollope depicts the absurdities that occur in a country whose premise is equality, and where reality continually falls well short of the mark. Although her conclusion is itself absurd, Trollope’s observations still remain wincingly accurate.

I'm sorry to be redundant and mention books about which I have just written, but I wanted to remark on a phenomenon.So, last week, discovering that I was out of things to read, I visited a secondhand book shop with ten minutes to spare and grabbed, basically at random:The Heart of the Matter by Graham GreeneThe Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (which I had never heard of but which was attached to Lucky Jim)Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (an outre pick for me. I had heard of it, but until I bought it I had no idea I wanted to read it)First I read The Heart of the Matter, then The Rachel Papers. In The Rachel Papers, young Charles Highland mentions the books in his childhood room, among them, The Heart of the Matter, which he later quotes. That's not particularly interesting. Graham Greene is hardly obscure. But then, Highland's Oxford tutor Bellamy says, apropos of basically nothing "...I believe a distant encestor [sic] of mine wrote a utopia novel. Looking Beckwards [sic] it was called..."Throughout my life as a reader I have noticed this thing happening over and over; a book I read after finishing a seemingly unrelated book turns out to be linked to the previous book in some way, however small or irrelevant. I know I'm not totally alone, because if you Google "reading coincidences" (I know, I know, pathetic Googling), the top three results sort of address what I'm talking about.The cynical among you will point out that, given the extreme narrowness of canonical Western literature in general, and the extreme narrowness of my mind and reading habits in particular, it's no wonder that everything starts to refer and self-refer in an endless, inbred loop. You have a point. But, all the same, doesn't it sometimes happen to you? Every book you read in a short period of time mentions one of the other books you just read, or a movie you saw last week, or even, like, a dream someone told you against your will? Doesn't it? And isn't it weird?What is it called? Is there, perhaps, a pertinent volume of Remembrance of Things Past to which I should address myself? And don't mention the madeleine. This is not a moment for the goddamned madeleine.

1.
It all started about five years ago when I received a call from a colleague of mine. We’d done a bit of work together, planning a new major for the college where we teach, and we’d been compensated for this work with a small bonus to our travel-and-research accounts. My colleague was calling to alert me to the fact – something he’d only then discovered – that if these funds weren’t spent by the end of that very day, they’d be forfeited and returned to the college.
I gathered up all the work-related receipts I could find, but when I totaled them up, I still had $177 dollars left. And so I did the only thing I could think to do, the only reasonable thing a person in my situation could do. I went down to my local Guitar Center, and I flagged down a salesman. I told him I had $177 to spend before midnight that night, and I asked him if he’d be willing to part with a Martin Backpacker for precisely amount, tax and case included.
The Martin Backpacker is a small broom-shaped guitar that’s light enough to be carried out into the woods on a backpacking trip, if you were so inclined. It’s also, according to the Martin catalog, the first guitar ever sent into outer space.
The sales dude told me he’d be delighted to sell me the guitar for that price, and he went into the back to get one.
Now, this made me extraordinarily happy for two reasons.
First, though I’d been playing since I was nine, I hadn’t gotten a new guitar since I was 14. I’d been playing less and less over the years, and I was unprepared for the sense of a renewed love affair a new instrument brings with it.
Secondly, I retained in my memory a sharply etched image of my father, leaning the great bulk of his body against the counter of Harrod’s Music Shop in Lubbock, Texas, bargaining with Clyde, the manager there, over the blue electric Fender Mustang he was buying to replace the clunky Fender acoustic he’d originally brought home for me when I’d mentioned to him that I thought I might like to learn how to play.
Big and cumbersome, this acoustic guitar was too difficult for me to play. The neck was thick and beefy, and the strings were so high, you could have hung laundry from them.
2.
As a kid, I was mortified by my father’s bargaining. Everywhere else, when you bought something, you paid what they asked for it. Dad was a businessman, he was a merchant, and he understood about mark-up. Still, I was afraid he might offend Clyde, that this back-and-forthing of theirs might end in a stalemate or, worse, an argument – Dad had an eruptive, unpredictable temper – and I’d lose not only the guitar, but Clyde’s affection, which would mean having to go elsewhere for my lessons. My teacher at Harrod’s was a lanky hippie iconoclast named Spider Johnson. He was an important, liberating presence in my young life, and I didn’t want to lose contact with him.
I worried as well that all this haggling might seem too Jewish for Clyde or for Mr. Harrod, the patrician owner of the shop. The founding conductor of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Harrod saw to the violins, while Clyde handled the guitars.
But Clyde, it turned out, was happy for the sale. As was the guy at Guitar Center. As was I. I’m sure it had more to do with my father than with the money, but the forty or so bucks the Guitar Center guy was willing to knock off the Backpacker left me feeling inordinately potent as a man.
I brought the little Martin home, and for my birthday, Barbara, my wife, bought me a couple of songbooks containing hits from the 1920s and ‘30s. I loved nothing better than to sit at our kitchen table late into the night, playing my little broom-shaped guitar and singing songs like “Button Up Your Overcoat,” “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” and “California, Here I Come!”
3.
My father was hospitalized a year or so after I bought the little Backpacker. He was living in Oklahoma City at the time with his second wife – my mother had died years before – and my brother and sisters and I each received a call, telling us we’d better get up there to see him.
No one expected him to leave the hospital. His kidneys were shot, and he had a cascading host of other medical issues. “His organs are just plumb worn out,” his nephrologist told me.
As soon as we’d all arrived, in fact, Dad went into a coma. At one point, there was even a Code Blue. The machines in his ICU room started whirring. The staff rushed in and pulled the curtains. The hospital chaplain even showed up, a fretful-looking woman in a boxy skirt-set.
“May I sit with you?” she asked each of us in turn, inflecting the verb somehow with overtones of Christian sodality.
“No thanks,” we each said.
She seemed relieved. Clutching her files to her chest, she sat down and disappeared when no one was looking.
As for the rest of us, we braced ourselves and waited for our father to die.
4.
But our father didn’t die.
Contrary to all expectations, he came out of his coma. Well enough to leave the ICU eventually, he was furloughed to an ordinary hospital room, and though he would spend nearly 60 days as an in-patient, he was ultimately released.
During those 60 days, whenever I came to visit him, I bought the little Backpacker along.
We didn’t have a lot of common interests, my father and I. Our conversations were often difficult and halting. But music was something we both loved, and I’d sit by his bed and play for him. It helped to pass the hours for both of us, and the odd-shaped guitar proved a useful conversation piece with the nurses.
5.
I don’t know what was going on in my father’s marriage, but when he left the hospital, he was no longer welcome at home.
He ended up in Dallas, living in Mrs. Rudd’s condominium.
Mrs. Rudd was my Uncle Richard’s mother-in-law. Too frail at 90-something to travel from her home in Wichita, she no longer used the place, and my father moved in in a quiet, if no less flagrant violation of the condo board’s rules, which forbade any and all forms of subletting.
I continued bringing the little Martin along whenever I visited – it was so light and easy to pack – and on one occasion, we all sat together as a family in Mrs. Rudd’s living room, while my brother-in-law Alan and I took turns on the guitar. Dad joined in, singing old cowboy and Sammy songs. He seemed to enjoy himself, and one day, he told me he thought maybe he’d buy himself a guitar, take a few lessons. Why not? He was retired and living alone with a pair of alternating caregivers. He had the time, and he asked me for advice on what to buy.
I was quite proud of him, proud that at the age of 76, he was up for something new.
“And if, for some reason, I can’t learn it,” he said, “I’ll give it to you and you’ll keep it.”
6.
The next time I was in Dallas, we all sat around in Mrs. Rudd’s living room again, singing and playing, and when I took a turn on my father’s new guitar, I remember thinking, Whoa! This is a beautiful instrument! Curvier than most guitars, it was shaped like a figure-eight with the upper bouts, the shoulders, as wide and round as the lower bouts, the hips; and the top, sides and back were all a matching, handsome, dark nutty brown.
“That’s a dreadnaught guitar,” my friend Elbein told me when I described it to him later. “Big and round?” he said.
I nodded. He seemed to know what he was talking about.
“Those’re called dreadnaughts, yeah,” he said. “After the battleships, because they’re so big and round, you have to play them standing up.”
“Yeah, well, whatever,” I said. “It’s just a beautiful instrument, and whether my father gives it to me or it comes down to me years later, I might just hang it on a wall as a symbol of my father’s will, you know, to keep learning and moving forward, and also because it’s just so damned beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guitar quite like that before.”
7.
As it turned out, Dad’s arthritis was too bad for him to pursue the guitar in earnest, and one day, when my daughter Arianna and I were in Dallas, he said to me, “Joseph, take that guitar. I’m never going to learn it.”
“Really, Dad?” I said.
“Take it, take it!”
“Because it’s just so beautiful, Dad. It’s really such a beautiful guitar. Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
Still, I was torn.
On the one hand, I hated to see him giving up on it. But on the other, I was thrilled to have the guitar. Either way, he was adamant, and when we said our goodbyes, Arianna carried the guitar out of Mrs. Rudd’s condo, while I went to get the car. By the time I’d driven back to the porte-cochere, she had taken it out of its case and was standing on one foot, balancing it on a raised leg, strumming a few chords.
I pulled up and looked at the guitar, and I thought, Hey, that’s not my father’s guitar! It wasn’t the guitar I remembered, the one shaped like an infinity sign with the nutty brown color. In fact, there was nothing special about this guitar at all.
It was nothing but a cheap blonde Alvarez!
8.
“Hey, Dad,” I said that night at dinner, “that’s not the original guitar you bought, is it?”
I was sitting next to him, and I couldn’t help asking him the question. He didn’t quite seem to understand it, though, which wasn’t surprising. The room was noisy, I was sitting on his bad side, and what I was asking him was utterly nonsensical.
“I mean, you didn’t buy two guitars, did you?”
“No, no.”
“Well, but then, I mean, what happened to the first guitar?”
“That is the first guitar,” he said.
Maybe my brother-in-law stole it. This was my next thought. Maybe he swapped it out for the Alvarez when he thought no one was looking.
There were only two problems with this, of course. First, Alan would never have done such a thing; he was too honest; and second, if he had, he’d never have gotten away with it; eventually, I’d see the guitar at his house.
This was all very problematical for me.
Mostly because my sisters have always insisted, especially when it comes to family history, that my grasp upon reality is – how to put this kindly? – less than firm, that, for me, memory and imagination are like two rivers that converge, that I tend to misremember things or, more probably, make them up.
Even I will admit that the two of them seemed to have grown up in an entirely different household from mine. They were born 18 months apart and because they’re close not only in age but in temperament, their versions of our family history are apt to match up, a fact I always attributed to a good dose of denial on their parts.
For the first time, though, I began to wonder if my sisters hadn’t been right all along. I mean, if I could dream a guitar up out of thin air, what else, over the years, had I imagined?
9.
The mystery of where this imaginary guitar came from persisted literally for years, until sometime after my father’s death, when the realization struck me with absolute clarity: the first guitar my father had bought me, that clunky, nearly unplayable Fender acoustic – the one with strings so high you could have hung laundry from them – had been figure-eight in shape with a handsome nutty-brown color. I’d forgotten all about that guitar, and now I realized, in a mental move that was laughably Freudian, filled with wish-fulfillment and dreamlike distortions, I’d substituted the first guitar my father had given me with the last guitar he’d ever give me, hoping in this way, I suppose, to reverse time and keep him alive.
It didn’t work, of course, but with a part of my inheritance, I bought a beautiful handmade acoustic arch top guitar, which I named Fig, partly because the figures in its maple back look like the inside of a fig, but also because Fig stands for F.ather’s I.maginary G.uitar.
And these days, it’s with Fig that I sit up late into the night at my kitchen table, singing those great old songs from the 1920s and the 1930s, songs like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Button Up Your Overcoat (You Belong To Me).”

1.In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky explains why personal blogs and social networking sites can sometimes confound us. He argues that before the internet, it was easy to tell what was a broadcast and what was a private message. A television show was a broadcast -- a message meant for a large audience of people, a public message. A telephone call, on the other hand, was a private message, meant for one other person. On the internet, though, the difference between the two kinds of media is much smaller. Is a personal blog a public or a private communication? Is it meant for mass consumption by thousands or millions of people? Not typically, and yet it can be read, theoretically, by billions.
This blurring of the two types of media is so difficult to grasp that it's produced its own near-ubiquitous straw man argument, which blogger Jason Kottke calls "the breakfast question." It comes up whenever anyone writes about social media: "Why would I care what you ate for breakfast that morning?" Shirky's rebuttal to this is succinct:
"It's simple. They're not talking to you. We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read.
I've been thinking about this particular idea a lot lately as it applies to Tumblr. For those who are unfamiliar with Tumblr, it's a blogging platform that categorizes posts into one form or another -- text, photo, chat, audio, video. It allows you to put out small bursts of content, which then goes into a feed. People can follow you, just as they can on Twitter, and they can "like" your posts and re-blog them. Tumblr offers a combination of Twitter's viral capabilities with a more customizable experience that allows for a tremendous level of personal expression.
I'm something of a Tumblr addict. It is the first thing I check in the morning -- before my email, before my Facebook page, but after I have some coffee (Some addictions are more powerful than others). What I love about it is the social interaction. I follow a large number of personal blogs that post funnier, more creative versions of "Here's what I had for breakfast." (I was following a blog that was, literally, about what people ate for breakfast, but I dropped it. I guess they weren't talking to me.) I also follow a bunch of themed blogs –The New Yorker Tumblr, for instance. They don't interact much with me, and that's fine. They're kind of like highly focused magazines, and I enjoy them accordingly.
But if that's all Tumblr was, I don't think it would be quite so important to me. It's the community that makes it special. Checking my Tumblr feed is like checking in with my friends, even if these "friends" are people I know very little about and will possibly never meet in real life. I met most of these people through friends of friends or via the social discovery that re-blogging affords. I somehow stumbled into their worlds, and they were interesting enough to make me want to come back. I interact with enough of them that I can pretty clearly say that when they post something, it is intended for me. I'm part of their small group, and I have no qualms about that.
Lisa, on the other hand, is a different matter. Lisa is a college student at a large university in the Midwest (and Lisa is not her name; I don't know whether she would want a bunch of book nerds suddenly reading her posts or not, so I'm not going to link to her blog here, either). She seems pretty smart, and she blogs about her love life, her schoolwork, her friends, and all of the other things that matter to her. I find Lisa's life very interesting, and her blog is great. But I haven't completely settled the "is she talking to me" question. While Lisa follows me back, we don't interact with each other. She uses Tumblr in a very social way, she isn't really part of the crowd of people whom I otherwise follow. And I find this somewhat troubling.
2.
At this point, I need to lay a few things on the table. First, I don't have a lot of close friends. My wife has several friends with whom she speaks on a regular basis. They talk about the things that are happening in their lives and how they feel about them. I don't have that. I'm a social person, and there are certainly people I love to have dinner with, meet at a party, etc., but ever since college that kind of close friendship has eluded me. And I think I'm okay with that, for the most part. But you could certainly argue that I use Tumblr to fill some void in my life, as pathetic as that might sound.
Also, Lisa is very attractive. And Tumblr has a way of encouraging people's vanity. On Wednesdays, for example, there's a tradition of posting a photo of yourself; this is known as Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Wednesday (GPOYW). This has the effect of sexualizing a lot of Tumblr blogs, to the point that my wife, Edan, hated it for months and months after I joined because she felt like every woman on it focused so much of her attention on her sexuality. I think she's probably right, though that was largely about who I was following (I used to run with a bad crowd, man). So let me just clear this up for you: I'm not following Lisa because she's hot or because I'm a perv. Let's be honest, if I wanted to look at 20 year-old girls, there are other places to do it; this is the internet we're talking about. Also, Edan, now on Tumblr, follows Lisa, too. We talk about her posts with each other. "She needs to dump that guy; he's bad news. He won't even hold her hand!" Edan will say. "He's a college kid. What do you expect?" I'll reply.
While I can't deny that gender plays a role here, that's not all there is to it. I like following her because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling. Following her blog is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone's daily life). She's my Jersey Shore.
But of course, Lisa isn't a reality TV character, she's a real person. Yes, I know Snooki is real, too, but celebrities are different. The fact that Lisa could walk the streets of every city in the world with complete anonymity makes her situation fundamentally different from, well, The Situation's. There are different laws governing pictures of celebrities and real people. Celebrities belong to us -- the public -- in ways that private citizens do not. And treating real people, regular people, the same way we treat celebrities, is problematic. And let’s not forget that Snooki and her ilk are paid to be in the public eye and to put up with all that entails.
3.
A few weeks ago, I went to an performance exhibition by my friend, the artist Charlie White. It was called Casting Call, and according to its website it was meant to further explore "White's ongoing interest in the complexities of the American teen as cultural icon, image, and national idea." For the exhibition, an art gallery was converted into two rooms, each separated from the other by a pane of glass. On one side of the room was a casting call for teen girls exemplifying "the All American California girl" -- blonde hair, tan skin, etc. -- between the ages of 13 and 16. White and his crew interviewed the models, took a mug shot-style photograph of them, and then brought in the next girl. On the other side of the glass, an audience -- mostly art students and hipsters -- watched. Our friend Stephanie, White's partner, pointed out that everyone on our side of the glass was brunette (except, it must be pointed out, Edan) while all of the models were, of course, blonde. White and his crew discussed each girl, both amongst themselves and with the girl, as well, but we could hear none of it. We were left to interpret the scene for ourselves. "Oh, look, they're letting that girl look at the photo. They must really like her,” I said. "Yeah, either that or they could tell she was upset, and wanted to reassure her she did a good job."
A seemingly never-ending stream of girls came through the door. What fascinated me most about the entire exhibition is how quickly we could objectify the girls. I don't mean objectify them in the way that it's commonly used -- to turn them into sex objects -- though there was certainly a tinge of the erotic about the event; by objectify, I mean to make them into something not quite human, and in turn, to talk about them as though they were things rather than people. "She's too old." "I like that one, in the leopard-print shorts. She's my favorite." "Look at how weird her hair is. Why does she look like that?" It was how we talk about people when they're on television, but these people were merely a few feet away. The pane of glass, and the contrast between the brightly lit casting room and the dim audience space, was enough distance to effectively dehumanize these girls. There were other factors at work, such as the blonde California girl's status as marketing conceit and sexual totem, but I think a big reason we all felt free to dissect and dismiss these girls is because they couldn't really see us. We were, more or less, anonymous. It was especially unsettling to turn around after watching for a few minutes and see one of the girls who had been in the call standing just behind us. How long had she been there, the girl in the leopard print shorts? And how did she suddenly become so real?
4.
The internet is such a tricky place now that anonymity actually needs to be explained and defined. There are actually a couple of flavors of anonymity on the web, and each of them comes with different issues. The first kind of anonymity is the one most of us are familiar with online, the anonymous user or commenter. This user is indistinguishable from the other anonymous commenters, and they can occasionally make some useful contributions. Anonymity can allow people to be more playful than they would be normally, maybe a little bit sexier, a little bit funnier. But they can also just be thugs. This type of anonymous user crops up on nearly every blog post, and while they occasionally voice a particularly controversial opinion, they are usually there only to spew bile and throw insults at the author of the post. In the comments of this site, I once joked that "anonymous" is always such a badass (To which Max replied, "I'd like a t-shirt that says "Anonymous: Internet Badass.""). There's a reason why some sites disable anonymous commenting of this kind; having no identity carries no threat of consequences. Even if others ridicule your ideas and effectively send you back to your cave with your tail between your legs, nobody knows who "you" are, so you can return the next day to fight again.
There's a second, more nuanced type of anonymity that is possibly more prevalent than simple anonymous commenting, and that's the disguise of the pseudonym. Every message board has its trolls, those who enjoy causing trouble, dissenting from the norm, and generally putting others down. I've yet to encounter a community online that doesn't have at least one of these people. They are rarely truly anonymous, since most message boards, social sites, and other internet communities typically require a user name. Instead, these users hide behind a moniker -- sometimes employing the same user name on multiple sites. Having some sort of identity does create some consequences. Users can be banned from sites, ostracized, or otherwise punished for their behavior.
Often, though, this type of user can simply change his name. This is another form of what Jaron Lanier, in his book You Are Not a Gadget, calls "transient anonymity:"
People who can spontaneously invent a pseudonym in order to post a comment on a blog or on YouTube are often remarkably mean. Buyers and sellers on eBay are a little more civil, despite occasional disappointments, such as encounters with flakiness and fraud. Based on those data, you could conclude that it isn't exactly anonymity, but transient anonymity, coupled with a lack of consequences, that brings out online idiocy.
On Tumblr, most people interact via their blogs which necessarily have a name attached to them. This insures that people will be generally civil. It is also an opt-in system, where you have to choose who to follow, which I think adds to the welcoming feel of the platform. It takes a while to build up a following and to create a blog you can be proud of; why throw that all away by being a creep or a jerk? The value of the blogs themselves creates an added buffer against what Lanier calls "Drive-by anonymity."
But there's another element of Tumblr that I've seen cause some very disturbing encounters. Each Tumblr comes with the ability to enable a feature that allows others to ask you a question. It can also be used as a de facto messaging system. The user can then decide whether they want to post an answer to your question or delete it. The trouble starts when the user enables anonymous questions. Some people choose to leave anonymous questions enabled because it can lead to some very interesting content. For instance, if the user wrote a brave post about a disease they had, someone might leave an anonymous note about that, not wanting to reveal that they too have the disease. A more shallow but still amusing use is the frequent comment "I have a crush on you" or "I think you're beautiful," etc.
For every one such comment, there are dozens of vile, offensive comments, meant to do little other than demean the author of the blog and make them feel worse about themselves and their lives. For instance, I follow a woman who posts lots of photos of art, gorgeous film stills, great music, and, yes, sometimes pictures of herself. One day she put up the poster for the film The Girlfriend Experience, about a prostitute who spends the night with her clients, going to dinner or a movie before having sex for money. A day or two later, an anonymous person sent this message to her: "You look like you could give a pretty good "girlfriend experience." How about it? Ever given any thought to doing something like that?" My response to this post was, simply put, rage. I posted a response along the lines of "The rest of us are trying to have a civilization over here. Take that elsewhere." I was enraged that this person had used this feature of the blog to suggest that the blogger would make a good prostitute. Keep in mind that the author of this blog didn't have to make this public. I assume she did so (without comment) to shame the jerk who asked the question. But it's worth noting that there was no guarantee of attention from anyone beyond this one particular blogger. He did this solely to mess with, belittle, and intimidate the author of the blog. And he did so with impunity.
He wasn't alone. Every day, without fail, another person I follow posts a comment or question that an anonymous user asked them. These questions range from the classically juvenile ("I'm masturbating to you right now." "Take ur shirt off!") to more pointed personal assaults ("What's it like coping with your obvious addiction to sleeping pills?" "You post a lot of photos of yourself because your looks are the only thing you have going for you." "You're an obnoxious bitch who probably has no friends."). Not coincidentally, every one of these questions showed up on a blog written by a woman. So far, three bloggers that I follow have had to abandon their old online identities when creepy people began harassing them online. All of them were women.
Why are women treated differently than men online? I suppose the greater question is why they are still treated differently everywhere -- online or otherwise -- but since this post is about the web, I will focus on that. Surely there's the garden variety sexism that permeates most of our culture, where women's opinions are discounted or denigrated, and where the female form is used to sell everything from liquor to football. But I think there is something else at work online, and in many ways, it's related to the strange feeling of watching all of those girls wait to have their pictures taken, as well as my conflicted feelings about enjoying college girl Lisa's blog so much.
5.
In her groundbreaking work "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," film theorist Laura Mulvey posits that Hollywood cinema always casts the audience in the role of the masculine spectator. The camera, therefore, becomes the male gaze, and the women on screen the passive objects of its gaze:
"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative."
She argues that simply looking is a pleasurable experience, and the cinema affords this pleasure by providing an atmosphere in which men are free to look at women, for as long as they please and with clear intent. She says, "At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other." On the internet, this seems to be compounded. We're free to look with impunity, and in some cases, we are free to anonymously harass, as well. Of course, it is sometimes pleasurable to be looked at, as well. While the internet indulges both of these impulses -- to look at and to be looked at -- it seems clear to me that we have once again forced the women more often into the latter role. Despite the great leveling effect that the web has had on the media -- it's given a voice to millions of people who would otherwise largely be silent -- we are still creating a system of "sexual imbalance," in Mulvey's terms. This is most acute where the female image actually appears -- on fashion blogs, personal blogging platforms like Tumblr, and of course pornography -- but it is present, more or less, throughout the net. In fact, I’ve often found that what provokes the anonymous assaults, more often than not, are not pictures of women but arguments made by them. This suggests that the harassment is a form of maintaining the male dominance; that it possibly (and maybe often does) come from other women is irrelevant.
The key difference between the films that Mulvey dissects in her essay and the personal blogs I'm talking about is agency. The films were made by men -- men called the shots (literally) and wrote the stories that cast women in the passive roles. Obviously a personal blogger decides what to post on her blog. But while this difference is worth noting, it doesn't seem to matter much in terms of the audience's reaction. In fact, the blogger's agency frequently becomes a weapon for the blogger's critics. "Well, if she doesn't want to be called a slut, maybe she shouldn't post such provocative photos." Doesn't this sound a bit like the "She was asking for it" argument?
6.
Which brings me back to the problem of Lisa. Feeling as I do about the internet, and the role gender is fast coming to play in it, I feel implicated by her blog (through no fault of her own). Part of this comes from the hazy status of intent. Does she want me read her blog? Strangely, not long after I began this essay, someone asked her if she was comfortable with so many strangers following her daily life. She responded that she didn't care; if they wanted to read about her and look at pictures of her, that was fine. This should have absolved me of my guilt, but it didn't. I keep coming back to Mulvey's argument: Am I deriving pleasure from looking at Lisa? I am. But I also post photos of myself, thereby enjoying the pleasure of being looked at. Still, no one has ever responded to an image of me with an anonymous note saying, "You look fat" or "Nice beard, asshole." Only women have to put up with that. And that is shameful. (It’s worth noting that the hot film of the moment, The Social Network, would have us believe that social networking, at its base, is about checking out girls and stalking ex-girlfriends. It’s why the stuff was invented, to let men objectify women from a safe distance.)
And that’s what weighs on me as I follow Lisa’s blog. I’m aware of the voyeuristic aspect of following the blog of a much younger woman, but at the same time, I feel a sort of odd friendship with Lisa. If she weren’t following me back and I were merely reading her posts, as many no doubt do, in total anonymity, I think that would be different. Perhaps following back is all the recognition I need to feel like Lisa is talking to me. And it's pretty clear from reading my blog who I am: I'm Patrick, I'm in my 30s, I live in LA, and I'm married. On the internet, being yourself is no small thing.
A year ago, I read one of those rare profound utterances that Twitter produces from time to time. It came from comedian Lindsay Katai: "The Internet: Where Ladies Promote Their Boyfriends' Endeavors. Conversely, the Internet: Where Men Make Every Pretense of Appearing Single." This rang true to me then, and I've thought of it frequently while reading Tumblr, where identities are formed one post at a time over weeks and months. The posts I most look forward to reading are the posts about people's lives -- the petty failures at work, the little strange thing they observed on the bus, a photo of themselves having fun.
I suspect I'm not alone in this. This is the pleasure of online life, it seems to me. It's the reason, more than any fancy coding or user interface, that Facebook is so successful. We want to know each other, to see what's happening in other people's lives. We want, in short, to read each other's stories. But that kind of world -- one that values openness and honesty -- can't exist if half of its participants have to be constantly vigilant lest they be verbally assaulted, harassed, or worse. If we, as a culture, don't do something to combat this, then we stand to lose more than just updates about meals and photos of pets. Like it or not, we are all going to have to live more and more of our lives online. I would hope that we could make that place better than the one we now call "real life" -- a place where people are free to be themselves, yes, but also where they are free to decide what that means for themselves, without fear of humiliation or intimidation. That's a place I'd like to call home.
(Image 1: Crazy staircase at the KPMG Building in Munich, image from [email protected]'s photostreamImages 2 & 3: courtesy Charlie White)

3 comments:

This is a nice introduction to an important literary niche that is actually more than a century old, but which has really come into its own since the 1990s. Your readers might want to know about Vertigo (http://sebald.wordpress.com/), a blog I have written weekly since January 2007 on all aspects of literature (fiction and poetry) that employ photographs. There are a number of exceptionally innovative books that use text and images in very creative ways.

Just to get it out of the way first, why does the (mainstream) lit world keep trying to brain wash me into thinking The Flamethrowers was a good book?

Anyways…

I’ve toyed with the idea of inserting pictures into self-pub books via KDP. It’s fairly easy to do so, and it’ll be interesting to see how artists in the future choose to marry the visual and textual in self-published works since 1) they are the future, and 2) there are no financial strings attached to putting pictures into KDP books like there might be with traditional ones (maybe someone on here knows more about the cost of printing pics in a trade paperback. I’m just assuming but it seems like this would put up the cost of inserting pictures).

Pictures in literary works usually annoy me as gimmicks, like a Pagannini concerto filled with bells and all sorts of other garrish ornamentation. The most groan-inducing example I can think of is the flip book in Incredibly Loud/Close by Foer. Woof. Double woof.

At the same time, I’m usually a fan of the “author’s doodle” that is sometimes inserted at the beginning of a chapter in various books. It is a really interesting aesthetic question though, what makes an image jar/not jar with text? I don’t know. Personally I don’t even like book covers, and the obsession with them in certain circles is, I think, qute unseemly. The word is the art, the cover is, in the end, just marketing. A good, thought provoking article.

I had the feeling that my children thought that I stood frozen inside the house while they were at school, only to be reanimated when they burst back through the door at the end of the day. Sure they knew I was a writer, but what did that actually mean to them?

Writers can be a saturnine bunch. While most are not as fatalistic as Bolaño — “I am among those who believe that man is doomed,” he once told an interviewer — the scars of poverty, political persecution, unrequited love, disillusionment, and/or exile (pick one!) are all over the canon as well as the cult classics. After all, sadness is often what prompts writers to record their thoughts in the first place; otherwise, it’s as French novelist Henry de Montherlant said: “happiness writes white.” So if the life of the writer — for whom writing offers the only solace from vicissitudes of life — is so miserable, how is Zadie Smith so happy?
In her essay “Joy” published in the January 10 issue of the New York Review of Books, Smith says she “experience[s] at least a little pleasure every day. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way.” The pleasure she describes often comes from food — little treats that have the transcendent power to momentarily lift her from the stresses of life: “Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.” These pleasures — which she distinguishes from “joy,” an intensified pleasure also fraught with terror (e.g. raising a child/doing ecstasy) — result from a lack of discernment, and Smith is aware of this. “Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review,” she writes. This comes with some cost, for “where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort.”
In her blissful critical indifference, Smith recalls Julio Cortázar. In his essay “Only a Real Idiot,” (originally published in Spanish as “Hay que ser realmente idiota para...” and collected in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds), Cortázar reveals the ostensible secret to his contented existence: his stupidity. By stupidity, Cortázar refers not to some sort of deficiency in his faculties, but rather his similar lack of discernment. Briefly, in the essay Cortázar relates a scene from the theatre, where his more sophisticated friends inform him that the Czech mimes and Thai dancers he’s so enamored of aren’t exactly anything special — in fact, they’re highly unoriginal, poorly directed, and ordinarily outfitted. And yet — “even though I understand perfectly how right they are and that the show was not as good as it had seemed to me...I was simply transported, idiot that I am…”
By stupidity, then, Cortázar is talking about his ability to suspend judgment, his ability to regard the Czech mimes and Thai dancers as the beau idéal of theatre; he’s talking about his ability to be swept up by the beatitude of the banal. He rhapsodizes about this sort of minutiae, saying,
My enthusiasm was not just aroused by the duck but came from something that was given material form in it, that might also appear in a dead leaf balanced on the edge of the bank, or in an orange crane, enormous and delicate, framed against the evening sky, or in the smell of a train car as you enter with a ticket for a trip of several hours when everything will rush by, stations, a ham sandwich, the buttons for turning on and off the lights (one white and the other violet), the automatic ventilation system...
Cortázar watching theatre is thus like Zadie Smith eating a pineapple popsicle. There’s a romanticism at the heart of both of their personalities that reminds them to be mindful of the all-consuming beauty that surrounds them — in fact, in Cortázar’s 1984 Paris Review interview, he admits, “I have to be rather careful when I write, because very often I could let myself fall into...an exaggerated romanticism. In my private life, I don’t need to control myself. I really am very sentimental, very romantic.”
These flourishes of happiness are ephemeral. The curtains close on the Czech mimes and Thai dancers, and only the wrapper of the pineapple popsicle remains after eight minutes. These are but individual moments of glee that sustain the rest of their day, moments that offer a respite from something — what exactly I’m not sure. Writing? Not writing? Reality? The demanding fictive realms in which — wait, I think I’ve just heard an incredible name. The horizontality of the “Z” beautifully balances the verticality of the “I.” It’s assonant. And when lowercased, almost all the letters are the same height!...Forgive me, I’ve been overcome by the aesthetics of the beautiful name I’ve just heard. Names, like words, make me happy. The mimetic sibilance of “fissiparous” or “susurration.” Spanish nouns — including “la idiotez” — with z’s to die for...I’m sorry, where were we? Ah yes. I’m still not sure if these moments Smith and Cortázar speak of serve to magnify pleasure or to offer succor to the stressed. Don’t ask me — clearly, I’m just another idiot.
Image via David Shankbone/Flickr

“Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, it’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.”